CD IELTS Prep
All band comparisons

Task 2 · Opinion (agree or disagree) · Health

Whether prevention should always come before treatment

An agree-or-disagree essay on health budgets, where the band 9 answer explains why prevention keeps losing these arguments instead of assuming the public is simply mistaken.

The question

You should spend about 40 minutes on this task. Write about the following topic. Give reasons for your answer and include any relevant examples from your own knowledge or experience. Write at least 250 words.

Governments have limited budgets for health care. Some people believe that public money should always be spent on preventing illness rather than on treating it. To what extent do you agree or disagree?

A 250-word discursive essay — the half of the paper that carries two thirds of the marks. This prompt is original, written in the standard format for teaching purposes — it is not taken from any past paper.

What separates the three answers

All three accept that prevention is cheaper. Only the band 9 asks why, given that everyone knows it is cheaper, governments keep funding treatment anyway, and treats the answer as a reason rather than an error.

The three answers

Band 6.5

262 words (the task asks for at least 250)

The answer works. It addresses the task, the reader follows it, and the meaning survives — but ideas stay general, linking is mechanical, wording repeats, and small errors are visible throughout.

The answer

Nowadays, the health budget of the every country is limited2 and the government must decide how to use it. Some people believe that the money should be always used for the prevention of the diseases and not for the treatment. I agree with this idea to some extent, but I think the treatment is also very important.

Firstly, the prevention is cheaper than the treatment. If the government is spending the money on the awareness campaigns about the smoking, the junk food and the exercise, many people will not get the serious diseases like the diabetes and the heart problems. In this way, the government will save a lot of money in the future, because the treatment of these diseases is very expensive. Also the vaccination is a very good example, because one injection can save a person from the big illness5.

Secondly, however, we can not forget the patients who are already sick.4 If all the money is going to the prevention, then who will treat these people? Every day the new patients are coming to the hospitals and they are needing the immediate help. The hospitals need the doctors, the machines and the medicines, and all these things are very costly. Their families are also depending on them. It is not humanitarian to leave the sick people without the treatment.1

In conclusion, I agree that the prevention should get more money because it is cheaper and it is saving the future generations, but the government can not stop the treatment completely, so a good balance is necessary between the both3.

What an examiner notices

  1. 1. Lexical resource

    “It is not humanitarian to leave the sick people without the treatment.”

    'Humane' is the word. 'Humanitarian' describes aid operations, and the slip is close enough to be understood, which is exactly what this band describes.

  2. 2. Grammatical range and accuracy

    “the health budget of the every country is limited”

    An article before 'every'. The same over-use of 'the' then appears before nearly every abstract noun in the essay.

  3. 3. Task response

    “so a good balance is necessary between the both”

    The prompt asks about an absolute claim. Ending on 'balance', without saying what the balance would be, leaves the question unanswered.

  4. 4. Coherence and cohesion

    “Secondly, however, we can not forget the patients who are already sick.”

    'Secondly' announces another supporting point; 'however' announces a reversal. Using both shows the linkers were chosen from a list rather than from the argument.

  5. 5. Lexical resource

    “one injection can save a person from the big illness”

    Reaching for 'serious illness' and missing. The essay's vocabulary for its own subject never becomes more precise than this.

One honest caveat

Band labels here describe what each piece of writing demonstrates against the four published assessment areas, paraphrased in plain language. They are teaching illustrations produced for this site, not official material, and no sample has been marked by a test provider. Real scripts are marked whole; two answers with the same label can still look quite different from each other, and nothing on this page can promise anyone a particular result.

Compare another question